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Cinebench R15, POV-Ray, Fluid Dynamics Tests

Cinebench R15 is a combination CPU and OpenGL 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation tool suite used by animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of system processor resources and can utilize any number of threads, which make is an excellent gauge of computational throughput. This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders and animates 3D scenes and tracks the length of the entire process. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below.

Cinebench

3D Rendering Benchmark

The 10-core, Broadwell-E based Core i7-6950X simply crushes every other system in Cinebench's multi-threaded test, but the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X and Ryzen 7 1700X finish just behind it. Next comes the Core i7-6900K, followed by the Ryzen 7 1700, which sells for roughly 1/3 the price. Cinebench's ability to leverage all available processor resources paint a rosy picture of Ryzen. Note that single-thread performance was also strong for Ryzen and is more than 41% higher than the much higher-clocked FX 9590.

POV-Ray Performance

Ray Tracing Benchmark

POV-Ray , or the Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer, is an open source tool for creating realistically lit images. We tested with POV-Ray's standard 'one-CPU' and 'all-CPU' benchmarking tools on all of our test machines and recorded the scores reported for each. Results are measured in pixels-per-second throughput; higher scores equate to better performance.

As good as Ryzen's numbers looked in Cinebench, they're even better in POV-Ray. The Ryzen 7 series processors scaled very well in the multi-threaded portion of this benchmark and finished 2 - 3 - 4 behind only the 10-core Core i7-6950X. Of course, you could buy all three of these Ryzen processors and have enough money left over to build a full system for the same price as the 6950X though, so AMD is in a particularly strong position here.

STARS Euler3d

Computational Fluid Dynamics

STARS Euler3d is a computational fluid dynamics benchmark which uses a CFD grid that contains 1.23 million tetrahedral elements and 223 thousand nodes. The benchmark executable advances a mach 0.50 Advisory Group for Aerospace Research, or AGARD, flow solution for an aeroelastic test wing. The benchmark score is reported as a CFD cycle frequency in Hertz.

This benchmark is multi-threaded, but is also dependent on platform bandwidth, so the final results are not determined by compute performance alone. Cache and memory bandwidth and latency affect the score as well...

The AMD Ryzen 7 series processors sandwiched the quad-core Core i7-6700K in this benchmark and trailed the 6, 8, and 10 core Intel processors by a relatively wide margin. There is still plenty of tuning and optimization work to do with Ryzen, however, so we wouldn't be surprised to see numbers in this benchmark change over time. Note the massive increase in performance versus the FX series.